“Wolfgang was very stubborn, my dad tried to convince him: ʻGo together, you are both in your fifties, you can surely solve all of this in peace.ʼ However, Wolfgang didn´t want. ʻNo, I am a citizen of Bohdalice, I was born here and I am a Czechoslovak. I am not going anywhere, I have never hurt anyone and thus nothing can happen to me. I will continue to take care of it here.ʼ I don´t know when exactly they captured him, but everybody who spoke German was taken to a prison camp for German soldiers and officers. So he was kept there in Vyškov and he died on January 24. There were some witnesses who remembered he suffered a lot, and in the end, he was found in January, wearing just his underwear, lying in the brook with pneumonia.”
“One SNB member came and said: ʻHe was a German who doesn´t deserve to have a funeral, thus it has been cancelled and you shall depart!ʼ This was in January and so my dad took his bike and was full of fear hurried to Mr. Měřinský, hoping he wouldn´t have problems, as all of this was organized in secret. Then they prepared a grave near the place of those German soldiers and buried him at night. They only placed him there and buried, without any ceremony. There were just these two men and Wolfgang´s wife present.”
“Once they came at night. Some swoop. At 3 a.m., everyone - out of his bed. And by the door there was a man standing with bayonet. They strewed everything what they could, searched if we had anything from the castle. But they found nothing. Because, you know, they tended to evict us to the borderland, as my father didn´t want to sign up for the cooperative… He refused.”
“But the front´s crossing was terrible. They burst into the castle, I mean also the civilians with the soldiers, and we don´t know much more about that. We were hidden in one basement shelter. They just threw everything out of the windows, furniture, clothes, bed linens, simply everything was heaped outside.”
“When Wolfgang was captured, Mrs. Mannerová stayed in the back room used for ironing. She got there one bed, one small table and there she lay. And she never came out of that room anymore. From the front´s crossing, when seeing the mess outside of the window, she was left nothing. No money, no food, nothing…”
Marie Kramárová, née Havránková, was born on September 16, 1937 in a Moravian village of Bohdalice. She idyllically spent her childhood as a daughter of a castle gardener of the Manner family. However, during the stormy events of 1945, her father František Havránek and the whole family became witnesses of a violent confiscation of the Manner´s castle and property, as well as of arresting Count Wolfgang Manner. The Count was subsequently placed in a prison camp for German soldiers, where he died in 1946. František Havránek strived to secretly bury the body of deceased Count Manner away from the mass grave for German soldiers. The only hint for him was a map of approximate place of Wolfgang´s eternal rest. Marie studied at the School of Pedagogy and in 1957 she got married to Jozef Kramár. Together they had two children and lived in Turčianske Kľačany. She spent her working age as an elementary school teacher in Vrútky, later in Martin. After the fall of the regime, according to the map of her departed father, she set off to search the place of Wolfgang Manner´s grave. After various struggles, she finally managed to locate the secretly buried remains of Wolfgang Manner and on January 24, 2016, exactly 70 years after his death, to carry out the Christian funeral service. The Count Manner´s remains were buried in a family vault in Bohdalice. At the time of the documentation, Marie lived as a pensioner in Martina. Marie Kramárová died on December 28, 2023.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
